Global managed services provider RingCentral brings out Glip, a free solution that offers video and audio conferencing — and integrates with team messaging, file sharing, contact, task and calendar management. The company refers to the integration as its “Smart Video Meetings” experience.

You might have thought of Ring Central as a PBX-replacement, a telecom-as-a-solution cloud provider. That was years ago.

The company’s main product, RingCentral Office, combines message, video and phone service. More than 350,000 businesses worldwide use RingCentral, according to a company spokeswoman. European rates vary from plan.

All those users and plans generated a big business for RingCentral: based on their success with RingCentral Office for workplaces, the company made the latest Forbes “Global 2000: The World’s Largest Public Companies” list.

Last year it launched RingCentral Rooms for Poly (built into the Poly Studio X all-in-one video bars) and RingCentral Rooms with dedicated videoconferencing equipment, including monitors, speakers, microphones and cameras.

All its service runs on carrier-grade service (and HD audio and video), a legacy from their telecoms roots.

“Don’t stop at 40 minutes,” RingCentral stresses Glip’s offer of free 24 consecutive hours for any meeting, an obvious challenge to the current market leader.

Glip comes with free features including:

• 24-Hour Meeting Duration: plus unlimited users per account so Glip can be used by teams and companies of any size – for free.
• Up to 100 participants per meeting: RingCentral Glip enables organizations to host meetings with up to 100 participants by sending a link, email, or text.
• One-click host and join: With RingCentral Glip, no downloads are needed. It’s even easier to hop on meetings right from within a browser, or the app. Users can start meetings with a single click directly from their browser.
• App integrations: Leveraging RingCentral’s open platform, Glip is tightly integrated with popular business productivity applications —Google (Workspace and Gmail) and Microsoft (Teams and Office 365).
• Switch devices: Users can switch live meetings between any of their favorite devices and take their meetings on-the-go.
• Flip to Glip: Converts email threads to team messaging.
• Cloud recording: Users can save meeting recordings and highlights to the cloud for up to seven days.
• Virtual backgrounds (beta): People can use prebuilt backgrounds offered free by RingCentral Video, customized backgrounds or blur their background.
• Closed Captioning (beta): The new service automatically converts spoken words into captions in real-time and populates them in a new section above the menu bar. Participants can also enable and disable this feature individually.
• Secure meetings: Includes the ability to manage your participants with meeting passwords and authenticated join, and a virtual waiting room
• Join using any device: Users can join from anywhere and stay connected from their desktop, smartphone or tablet and also participate via multiple devices concurrently.
• Third-party cameras: In addition to RingCentral’s virtual backgrounds, users can now customize their meetings with backgrounds, filters, and other special effects from third-party integrations. These integrations include XSplit, mmhmm, Snap Camera, ManyCam, OBS Studio, and others.
• CCPA and HIPAA: RingCentral Glip is fully secure and complies with applicable data protection laws, such as CCPA and HIPAA.

There are more and if those free features aren’t enough, Glip Pro+ offers additional video meeting and admin management capabilities including the option to host larger meetings for up to 200 participants, advanced analytics, single sign-on, and more.

For customers looking to add cloud PBX capabilities to RingCentral Glip, they can upgrade to RingCentral Office that offers Message, Video, Phone (MVP) experience combining video meetings, team messaging, and a cloud phone system for integrated, enterprise-grade business communications.

While some companies will seek a Ring Central’s broader Unified-Communnications-as-a-Service solutions, many business people (especially with all the Work-from-Home) will be satisfied with the free Glip video meeting service.

As a name “Glip” sounds almost playful, but this RingCentral freemium offer is a serious (and scaleable) business with the potential to be a thorn in Zoom’s side.